Housings for still or video cameras are used for underwater imaging as well as in other applications where imaging in environments with liquids, high humidity, corrosive materials, and other difficult environments is required.
Housings of this kind have been used for decades in applications such as undersea photography, film making, oceanography, oil exploration, as well as in high pressure environments, wells, liquid filled tanks and machinery, and various other difficult environments.
Many applications use separate housings for imaging elements (e.g., still or video cameras) and lighting elements (e.g., halogen, incandescent, or more recently LED lights). However, some housing applications require or benefit from or require combining imaging and lighting in a single device or housing (e.g., to minimize overall size, reduce complexity, provide shared signaling, power, and/or control, as well as for other reasons). Existing housings for combined camera and light use typically have multiple ports/windows, with separate ports for cameras or other imaging elements and lights. This leads to more complex, expensive, and structurally weaker housings. Existing housings that use a single port suffer with problems due to internal reflections of light from the light sources (e.g., LEDs) that contaminate the external light being directed to the camera.
Accordingly there is a need to address the above as well as other problems in the art to provide improved housings for imaging and other optical applications that combine imagers and lighting elements in proximity to cameras or imagers.